Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied. Leonard Cohen
How you think determines what you see. As a Toyota acolyte, I learned to see & think in a different way.
The past decade I’ve been immersed in Innovation thinking - how to create
something valuable seemingly out of thin air. This is the first of a series of
articles on what I’ve learned.
A human being drew this.
Decision-Making: Consensus or Prove Me Wrong?
Soft Consensus:
When it comes to
Innovation (or Strategy), avoid ‘soft consensus’. Here’s a
common scenario: Our path forward is unclear. We have conflicting data or no
data at all. So, let’s go around the Board room or team room & try to reach
a consensus. Let’s give everyone a chance to speak & weigh up what we think
it all means. Everyone’s voice gets equal weight, regardless of how much
expertise or skin in the game they might have.
People who are most emotional get extra points. Sometimes this devolves
further into HIPPO or ZEBRA or WOLF management.[1]
Everybody pretends
things are ‘just great’, and such sessions often end with heartfelt paeans to
engagement & inclusiveness. But to
quote Leonard Cohen, ‘Everybody knows the ship is rotten. Everybody knows
the captain lied.’
This is a great way
to kill Innovation & destroy Value. We thereby institutionalize Confirmation
Bias - the Lord Voldemort of bad thinking. New offerings sink like stones
& good riddance. Toyota acolytes are
familiar with that great company’s deep understanding of Waste. Is anything
more wasteful than designing & releasing an offering nobody wants?
Prove Me Wrong
If you want to
innovate, encourage dissent & disagreement. Encourage those who disagree to
explain their thinking. Prove me wrong conveys great benefits. For a
start, it encourages people to challenge the weakest elements of your
hypothesis. It compels the Innovation team to validate their ideas with data. Prove
me wrong reinforces the fact that Innovation entails experimenting your way
to Value, in the dark. Rarely do we have
a deep understanding of the key questions:
●
Who is the customer?
●
What does the customer
value?
●
Why do they buy or not buy?
Pretending otherwise,
is preparing to fail. Only through quick, smart & binary experiments can we
begin to understand the problem we’re trying to solve. ‘Quick, smart &
binary’ are antithetical to ‘soft consensus’, which is commonly slow, thick &
data-poor.
Innovation thrives on
the margins, with the oddballs, eccentrics & iconoclasts. The ones that
challenge that status quo, the ornery & quirky. Soft consensus, by contrast, cuts off the
so-called ‘long tails’ of the distribution, and with them, the interesting,
eccentric & profound.
Last Word
Prove me wrong is perhaps the most
challenging Innovation mental model. Companies that seek to emulate Toyota
rightfully emphasize ‘Respect for People’. Prove me wrong is easily
mistaken for disrespect. Mature leaders will understand that the opposite is
true. Another common mistake is giving a platform to ‘Grumblers’. [Please refer to my earlier series on
Fukuda’s Parable.] Grumblers and iconoclasts are not the same thing. The former
are cynical & disengaged and we must ignore them. The latter are
passionate, may be angry or frustrated, but are fully engaged. Listen to them.
Best wishes,
Pascal Dennis E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org
